Archives for: June 2005

Ahhh…one the joys of being back in the Northeast does include, among many other things, the unabashed right to complain about the weather—whatever it may be!! This week the major complaint is the soggy, warm, wet wool blanket feel of the thick, thick air. One of my water aerobics patrons put in perspective today by saying, and I quote, “It’s summer, what do you expect?”

Ain’t that the truth!

Anyhow, as for life on the BTD…things are going along as best they can I suppose. I don’t know where I thought I was going to have all kinds of time over the summer, because my schedule hasn’t let up yet—and doesn’t look to soon. Well, I’m lying, it will let up over 4th of July weekend…so at least there’s some kick-back time to look forward to at the end of the week. We will be enjoying part of our weekend on the coast in Maine, and I hope to bring sweet potatoes, turkey, and compliant veggies for the grill. I’d love to have some seafood too…but the bitter (red tide) Maine contingent may not allow it on principle.

Anyhow, summertime is the best time on the BTD if you live in a place where local fresh fruits and veggies are not available year round. All of our best foods (I speak for AB’s here) are summertime foods, and we have the most opportunity for outdoor hiking, paddling, exploring and adventuring possibilities. Is there anything more that could be balm to the soul? Maybe a winning powerball ticket…but that’s a big maybe!!

Planning is my life. Some friends and my mom would describe my planning as scheming. Often I prefer to think of it as the daydreams of a restless heart, though I know that that’s only me trying to rationalize away my inherent need to…well…scheme, I mean…plan.

I plan for school, honestly I OVERplan for school, but it’s always better to keep the little darlings busy than to have them bored with nothing to do. I plan for my future: financial, domestic, physical, recreational. And finally I try to plan for eating. I try to plan for a day, for a week, for an outing, for the rest of my life.

The most obvious interruption to all of this food planning is the grocery store. It’s just too darn busy, noisy, expensive, corporate…blah, blah, blah… The next most obvious problem to food planning is time—time to be in the kitchen cleaning, chopping, and cooking food, or time to be in an actual seated position for a meal (rather than in a standing position over a kid serving lunch detention). But really all of this whining is just hogwash. Really.

The truth is, nobody’s perfect. For real (or, if you’re from the left side, for reals). I mean it. In fact, I embrace it!! I love not being perfect…especially when it comes to food planning. Here’s the thing about not being perfect: it’s okay to not be perfect as long as you are willing to learn from your mistakes. That’s another thing I’m pretty good at…learning from my mistakes. It’s a lucky thing too, because I make a lot of them. Often. But back to food stuff…

All this not being perfect and learning from mistakes means that the BTD becomes a habitual way of life in small increments as the years go by. For example, I measure things nearly always. Six ounces of soy milk in my two cups of coffee for the day. Half a cup of yogurt into my plastic container with another half cup of frozen fruit. A cup of boiled beans poured over a half cup of rice and a chopped up tomato for lunch. The measuring gets even better than that. Dr. D suggests cheese in two ounce servings, so if I buy a hunk of mozzarella cheese that is twelve ounces—I cut it up right away into six mostly equal hunks to be stored in a ziplock baggie. Then, when I use my famous check-off chart, I can track exactly how much cheese I’m sucking down a week. More measurements include dividing ground turkey into four ounce sections before freezing, noting how heavy the fish fillets were that I purchased and dividing out my portion into an appropriate serving size.

It would be nice to think that someday I’d get to the point of having a kitchen scale that I used to weigh and measure every bit of nourishment that went into my body. That think falls very clearly on the dayreams-of-a-restless-heart side of my planning spectrum. The pragmatic other side of the spectrum recognizes that (nobody’s perfect and time is scarce) little habits incorporated into a healthy lifestyle with lots of physicality thrown in will go much farther than cerebral scheming to be the perfect diet master.

As always, thank you for reading my blog…especially when I show up with a wandering, rambling, twisting bit of words tangled on the screen. May you smile, sigh, learn, or just shake your head and thank goodness that you’re more put together than me with all this blood type diet stuff anyway. With love from the great Northeast…keep eating healthy, keep thinking healthy, take care of your spirit, and most of all…be well…